Catching up.

I think that blogs posts from me in the coming weeks might be a bit like the proverbial hen's teeth as I am finding juggling the job at the cafe along with everything else all consuming at the moment, not to mention exhausting. I'm not sure I'm quite rocking the 'struggling artist waiting tables to make ends meet' image at my age! All I can think about is this particular waitress!

Friday was a fun day at work though as we held a Wear it Pink day to raise money for Breast Cancer Now. I brought in some raspberry ripple cupcakes which were sold alongside all the other goodies and lots of friends popped in to support the good cause.

I then worked all day on Saturday and another five hours on Sunday but despite being tired I was determined when I finished on Sunday not to waste the last couple of hours of sunshine. Rather than venture further afield we just headed out of the house and walked the footpaths around our village.

As always Hector enjoyed the extra long walk and a chance for a good run.

We stayed out for almost two hours until the sun started to go down... it was beautiful.

I was also given a huge bag of quince (is quinces a word... I don't think so, it sounds wrong?) before the weekend so I couldn't let them go to waste. They look so gnarled, knobbly and unpromising but I know they yield the most exquisite perfumed jelly. They are ridiculously hard and difficult to cut when raw but I chopped them up and boiled them to a pulp before passing them through a jelly bag.

The result liquid was then boiled up with sugar and some lemon juice and I now have several jars of beautifully fragranced amber jelly.... fifteen jars to be precise! What on earth I will do with fifteen jars of quince jelly I'm not entirely sure. No prizes for guessing what I might be giving people at Christmas!

I also had a yearning to make Welsh cakes. My Mum used to make them when we were young although nowadays she buys them ready made from the supermarket. I thought if I made some I could take her a few... except we seem to have eaten them all. They really are best eaten warm and fresh... just saying! I promise I'll make more for my Mum.

It's probably not surprising that my own sewing seems to have taken a back seat over the past couple of weeks but I just had to share these two beautiful little gift boxes made by a couple of my students, Ruth and Julia, at my weekly machine embroidery class. They are just 5 cm square and really are gorgeous. Ruth has only been doing machine embroidery with me for seven weeks... how clever is that!

So that's what I've been up to over the past week or so... tomorrow I'm back at the cafe so life feels a little like a merry-go-round right now.

What have you been up to lately?

A Ritual

It really doesn't matter how many jars lurk in the cupboard from the previous year... Or possibly even years. And there are always some, as marmalade consumption is rather slow in our house given I'm the only one who eats it, unless it gets baked into a cake or a pudding. But when the Seville oranges appear in the shops briefly during January, I cannot resist buying them for a marmalade making session. It's an annual ritual, capturing that little bit of sunshine in a jar during the cold grey days of January.

A day of making marmalade is like bringing a little bit of hygge to the kitchen. I prefer the slow method of squeezing out the pips and juice from the bitter oranges and then thinly slicing the peel by hand. It is then left to soak overnight in the juice and water.

The following day it gets boiled until soft and then cooked up with sugar until it makes marmalade. I love the way the windows steam up, the kitchen becomes warm and cosy and the whole house smells of fragrant oranges.

This year I used half demerara sugar and it has produced a wonderful dark almost treacle like conserve. I also found the remnants of a bottle of Jack Daniels in the cupboard so that went in too... slightly more than I had actually anticipated was left in the bottle!

But it has made the most intensly flavoured dark marmalade.

Which of course, I had to try... on a slice of soda bread which went down nicely with an afternoon cuppa.

Since embarking on our healthy eating regime I've been making soda bread each week for our lunches and to go with our soups.

It really couldn't be easier. In a large bowl combine 450g of wholemeal plain flour, 75g mixed seeds (such as sunflower, linseed, and pumpkin), 1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda and a quarter teaspoon of salt. Then in a large jug mix together a tablespoon of black treacle with a tub of buttermilk (cartons seem to vary between 280ml and 300ml but the exact quantity doesn't matter) and make this up to between 425 and 450ml with cold water. Mix this thoroughly into the dry ingedients to make a soft, slightly sticky dough. The amount of water you need does tend to depend on the flour. Leave to stand for 5 minutes while the oven heats up to 200 deg C (180 fan). Then shape the dough into a round loaf (or two smaller loaves as I tend to do) and place on a non stick baking sheet and bake for 30 minutes.

Making soda bread each week has also become something of a ritual this month and I like the idea of eating something that is not packed full of additives. As you might have gathered we are now approaching the end of a whole month of eating better, it's not been difficult, everything seems to taste so much better, we're enjoying our food and we feel so much better too. Alhough there has been cake this weekend... more about that next time!

Five on Friday - My Week

It's not all cake and baking in my house you know... Although you would be forgiven for thinking that! So just to prove otherwise a quick round up of my week and I'm joining in with Amy for Five on Friday

1. Dog walks

 The weather really has been wonderful around here lately. Although the temperature has dropped we've had some fabulous bright days and Hector and I have been out for several walks every day.... I tell you, I'm nailing that Fitbit target! I was practicing his "Sit & Wait" while I took the photo. He was practicing his "What on earth for?" look.

 The colours of the leaves and berries have been spectacular.

 

2. Sunsets

 

Our last walk in the evening has coincided with some spectacular sunsets. I'm trying to enjoy them and ignore the fact that it is dark way too early!

 

 3. Foraging and Jam making

I've come back from walks laden with crab apples and rosehips in an attempt to recreate the wonderful apple and rosehip jam we had on holiday. I failed because I've made a concoction that tastes only of sugar... but it's a pretty colour and tastes okay on toast. And talking of jam I've "lost" eight jars of apricot jam that I made in the summer. We haven't eaten it, I've not given it away so I must have put it somewhere safe. Where on earth does anyone hide eight jars of jam? No... I don't know either but I'll let you know if I find them.

5. Halloween

 

I carved a pumpkin for the doorstep and then worried I'd made it too scary. But I'd underestimated the children of our neighbourhood. "Your pumpkin is awesome" from the mouth of a five year old! I think I took inspiration for his teeth from my Victoria Sponge.

5. Baking

Okay, I tricked you... I have been baking... just a little bit. No cake but I did make these gingerbread biscuits for the Brownies' halloween party. And then just because they were fun to make I made more for the Farm Shop.

So that's pretty much my week. There has been some sewing too but that can wait for another post and now I'm back to making cakes. Three this weekend but is meant to be wet so it's a good excuse to be inside.

Whatever you are doing, have a lovely weekend!

                     

Love Made My Home

Jam

One of the perks of supplying cakes to the farm shop is sometimes, Linda, the owner turns up with a glut of some over ripe fruit or another. Four weeks ago it was a big bag of black bananas... there was a lot of banana cake that week. A week ago she brought me twelve punnets of strawberries that were just turning past their best. As I was about to go away for a few days I chopped them up and put them in the freezer... all 6kg of them!

Today I decided I ought to do something with them so I began a jam making marathon... prolonged because the first batch didn't set. Strawberries are not very high in pectin so it is not easy to obtain a set, especially when the fruit is over ripe. I used jam sugar with added pectin, plus some lemon juice:

1.5 kg strawberries, 1.25 kg jam sugar, juice of one and a half lemons

And eventually after boiling it all up I've ended up with 35 jars of softly set Strawberry Jam, which will now find its way back to the farm shop

And while I was stirring and simmering I remembered a book I used to read to my boys when they were little...they loved the story of Mr. Castle and his jam making exploits.

A super efficient stay at home Dad, Mr Castle makes plum jam from the fruit tree in his garden. As more plums drop he makes more and more jars of jam until eventually he is fillng every container in the house from the tea pot to flower vases. The family end up eating jam with every meal - jam in their porridge, jam in their lunch time sandwiches, jam roly poly after their dinner... "Their days were full of jam eating and their nights of dreams all dripping with jam." Just as they finish their last pot of jam they hear the thud of a plum falling on the roof... a whole year has past and it all starts again!

I've kept a box of all the favourite picture books from my boys' childhood...my favourites too, I love a good picture book... so I was delighted to find I had kept our copy of "Jam".

 I think I might have made quite enough Strawberry jam for one year though!

Apricot & Fig

The painter and decorator finished in the kitchen at about 4pm on Friday and the fitter finished off the skirting boards at about 6 pm. Cutting it fine even by my standards.

 

 Fortunately I had managed to package up some mini Christmas cakes and several packets of biscotti earlier in the week.

But Saturday turned into a baking frenzy of mincepies...

 

Gingerbread biscuits...

And if you will allow me to say so,,, the most amazing cranberry and clementine Bundt cake, rich with white chocolate and soaked fruit yet light and fragrant too. I may have got a little over enthusiastic with the spray-on glitter though... a little over excited too!

 

There was also a triple layer gingerbread and caramel cake...

 

As well as a gluten free almond and clementine cake. There was also some very naughty Rocky Road but that disappeared before I took a photo.

 

And despite all the last minute rush, everything was ready for my Tasting Day and launch of my new venture "Apricot and Fig" on Sunday afternoon.

 

People came all afternoon and there was a definite buzz and excitment. Lots of cake was sampled, lots of cake was bought and even more was ordered. I virtually sold out of all these jams, jellies and chutneys

By the end of the day I was exhausted but left happy feeling that I might actually make a success of this.

Meanwhile this week there has been more embroidery, lots of shifting of boxes and furniture and I'm still exhusted... but that's all a story for another time!

Don't forget to leave a comment on this post if you would like to have a chance to win a set of Cambridge Christmas cards.

Shades of Gold

My friend Celia keeps a small flock of Ryland sheep.

They are friendly, inquisitive creatures and will come up to the fence if you walk past their field, curious to see you. Celia uses them for both showing and breeding but in the past couple of years she has also had their fleece spun into yarn.

We were chatting about the different weight yarns produced and the possiblity of mixing it with other yarn from different breeds to get different colours and eventually got onto the subject of natural dyes. Now I am no expert by any means but I have had success using onion skins to dye yarn in the past.

I got our local farm shop to save me all their loose onion skins and then I dyed one of the balls of yarn. I did take photos of the process but to be honest, pots of murky looking liquid bubbling away on the stove are not that picturesque! (And not a great advert for my cooking skills!)

But to cut a long story short... this is the result and this is what I have knitted from them.... a pair of very warm and cosy chunky mitts. Do you have any idea how difficult it is to get a selfie of your own hand? Let's just say there were several out of focus shots of my thumb!

They really are the most wonderful shade of deep gold. And talking of gold (she says neatly segueing into a completely unrelated subject)... I also picked these fabulous quinces from an absolutely fully laden tree outside the gym that I go to very occasionally. Fortunately for me I decided to go for a swim on Monday!

Much as I enjoyed looking at a bowl full of them just like this, I thought I ought to make something with them. The first small batch I made up into a quince jam, using a recipe from the Honey & Co Baking Book. If you have ever cooked quince you will know that they are rock solid, even when ripe and the job of coring and peeling them was a bit of a faff even though the end result is a lovely dense pink jam. So after my Pilates class on Tuesday I picked some more and turned these into quince jelly, which doesn't require the removal of skin and core... but in the interests of recipe development I had a little play around and came up with a fragrant quince and orange jelly.

I had about 1.5 kg of quinces which I chopped up into small pieces... core, skin, the lot! I then added the juice of one lemon and the juice and rind of one large orange. This was all bubbled together with 1.5 L water until everything was soft and mushy. This was then let to drip through a jelly bag overnight.

I then measured the juice (which wasn't as much as I had hoped so maybe I should have used more water) and added 500g of granulated sugar for every 600 ml of juice. This was then heated slowly to dissolve the juice and then boiled rapidly until it reached setting point. This didn't take very long as the quinces are so full of pectin. I then skimmed off the scum that had formed on the surface, added a few tablespoons of orange liqueur and then potted it into sterilised jars. It made almost three full 1lb jars of wonderful rose gold jelly.

Which goes very nicely with my new golden mitts!

(Did you see what I did there!)

In between knitting and playing around with recipes, I'm still teaching machine embroidery and this week I've been getting ready to go back to Missenden Abbey for the weekend. Looking forward to seeing what my students have produced over the summer. (No pressure if you are reading)

Have a good weekend!

Five on Friday... From my kitchen

After such a hectic and emotional weekend I have found some peaceful down time in my kitchen this week... so joining in with Amy and Five on Friday I bring you five of the the more photogenic things I have produced... not that the fishcakes or pasta bake etc. were particularly ugly... I just didn't take any photos!

 

1. Elderflower Cordial

 

 

On Monday I went foraging for elderflowers which seem to be particularly abundant in our village this year, which is probably a good thing as everyone I speak to seems to be making cordial this year.

 

 

This resulted in four bottles of rather delicious cordial... almost worth falling over in the hedgerow and twisting my knee for! A sight to behold, but fortunately the pain was relatively shortlived and my knee seems back to normal (which is never great in the first place!)

 

2. Elderflower Cupcakes

 

The cordial inspired a batch of elderflower cupcakes. No time to share the recipe right now but it is a plan to update this blog at some point and add some recipe pages. Don't hold your breath!

 

3. Chocolate Cupcakes

 

 

4. Sticky Toffee and Salted Caramel Cupcakes

 

Okay... I appreciate I'm stretching the whole Five on Friday thing with three different lots of cupcakes but Mr. Fan my Flame had a birthday and wanted to take cakes into the office... so this was them. Three dozen cakes taken in on Wednesday morning... not many brought home Wednesday evening!

 

5. Strawberry Jam

 

 

I often make jam* but can't remember when I last made strawberry jam. But the strawberries were on offer and I fancied making some. That was despite the twenty seven* or so jars of jam and marmalade in the cupboard from last year. It's about enjoying the process right?

 

There has also been lots of walking, meeting up with friends and a bit of soul searching but if I told you all about that it wouldn't be five on Friday, so it will keep for another time. Have a lovely weekend... I'm teaching again tomorrow but I've got a day off on Sunday!

 

Joining in with Amy for Five on Friday